


we'll learn what it means to be at home.

by keehl



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga), Death Note: Another Note
Genre: Angst, Childhood Friends, Childhood Sweethearts, Fluff, Loss of Parent(s), M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Wammy's House Era (Death Note), Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:01:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27115078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keehl/pseuds/keehl
Relationships: Matt | Mail Jeevas/Mello | Mihael Keehl
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

Days into weeks into months, a blur of time that felt empty, cold, cruel, harsher than the Russian winters Mihael was so familiar with, the sort of cold one could never hope to shield himself from, because it wasn’t a physical cold, but the sort of cold that built up inside of him and froze him from the inside out, taking hold of the heart and mind, subduing him, killing the childlike innocence he had managed to hold onto despite the adult maturity of many aspects of his mind. It was a cold he could never hope to describe to anybody who hadn’t experienced it for themselves, a cold he wouldn’t wish on anybody else. An emotional glacier, which no amount of blankets, hot drinks, and hours spent by a lit fireplace could begin to melt.

Mihael had scarcely spoken a word in nearly half a year, had taken to further isolating himself from others his age, the gap between himself and them growing into an impassable chasm, one that some adults feared he may never be able to bridge again. Mihael didn’t want to. For all he cared, he could fall into it, and he wouldn’t fight to climb back out.

The accident had been in December, only days after his eighth birthday. It was approaching June now, and despite the changing weather, the thawing of the winter snow and the emergence of the sun, the cold that had taken a hold of Mihael hadn’t shifted in the slightest. He may have been young, but Mihael was intelligent far beyond his years, and he understood what death was. He understood well what he had lost and what he would never be able to have again.

Being a child of such exceptional gifts, Mihael had always had a very hard time being understood by other children his own age, and understanding them in turn. The way he spoke confused them, his use of words they had never encountered and likely wouldn’t for years to come made them loathe to speak to him, his love of reading books written in languages they knew no more than a word or two from — hello, goodbye, how to count from one to ten — making him a baffling entity they wanted nothing to do with. And in turn, the nature of socialisation among children, the unique ways their culture developed, rhymes with no notable origin spreading across generations with no real explanation as to how outside of school yards, similar across the world, the fact that much of childhood communication was done wordlessly, based on instincts and internal knowledge that Mihael seemed to lack, made it impossible for him to wrap his head around them.

This isolation from his peers, however, had never been something that bothered him, however. Because that didn’t mean he was totally alone. He had never felt alone, because his family, his mother and father, despite their own bafflement at their son’s mind at times, had always encouraged him, nurtured him, pushed for schools to challenge him, bought him books in languages they didn’t understand and had tried hard to learn for him. Mihael had taken pride in his mother’s English in particular, she had worked hard to learn with him, and over the years she had developed a very impressive level of fluency considering the fact that her teacher was her own young son. She had always listened as he explained grammatical rules that made no sense to her, nodded along and did her best to remember different idioms and the confusing pronunciations of words, beamed at him with pride when he gently corrected her. He had found his father struggled to learn other languages, but he had still done his best to engage in other ways with his son, listening to him recount what he had read in books about history, often chiming in with comments about things his own father had told him in his childhood, having experienced the second world war himself, albeit as a young boy.

He was sure it had a hand in his own social ineptitude, but Mihael had never resented the fact that his only friends were his parents. They were warm, kind, they listened to him when teachers told him he was going too far off topic, when other children stared at him in confusion before moving on to talk to others about things Mihael himself could never understand. He had been glad, in fact, that they had made the effort nobody else did to engage with him, despite a lack of understanding. A gift from God, his mother used to call him. Her Angel Mihael.

It felt to him like no time at all had passed since he lost them. Like it could have been just yesterday. The image of his mother throwing herself over him to protect him as their car was hit, and the deathly quiet that had followed. The panic, unlike anything he had ever felt before, as he tried desperately to shake them awake, despite knowing exactly what it meant when he took hold of their wrists, and despite searching desperately with fingers trembling not from the cold but from fear of what he knew to be true, found nothing, no sign of life in either his mother or his father. By the time emergency services reached them Mihael had stopped crying, instead staring blankly at the wreckage, while the driver of the other car involved watched him nervously, knowing everything she had been instrumental in taking from him. He didn’t blame her. Accidents happened. Maybe it would have been easier to come to grips with if he had been able to pin the blame on her, on _someone_.

Mihael had no other family he knew. No aunts or uncles, no grandparents still alive. It had just been himself, his mother, and his father all his life. And because he was left with no family, there had been a fuss made over what to do with him. Not that he’d been in much of a state to pay attention to what was going on regarding that. While Mihael was usually a very attentive child, who tended to understand complex situations better than most his age might, he’d felt as if he was watching the proceedings from afar, simply letting things happen, allowing decisions to be made without protesting, because he didn’t particularly care. There had been attempts to put him through counselling, but he’d simply refused to speak to every doctor thrown at him for the last six months, and finally it seemed that they were beginning to understand that the last thing Mihael wanted was to _talk_ to somebody about what had happened. He wasn’t looking to be spoken to like a child by doctors who didn’t seem to quite understand what it meant when they were told that Mihael was ‘highly intelligent’, to be asked how losing his parents had made him feel as if he could ever even hope to put that emptiness, that cold into words. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced, and it was something he was sure a person would have to have felt themselves to ever understand.

He had never had a history of being ‘difficult’. In fact, he had always been described as a very pleasant child to work with. Teachers praised him for how mild mannered and well behaved he was, how easily he co-operated with them. But now he saw no use in co-operation. Talking to a stranger about how he felt wasn’t going to bring his parents back, and dragging the ordeal out to him felt just like rubbing salt in the wound. All he wanted now was for everybody to leave him alone.

He’d been placed in a home for children run by a small group of Catholic nuns, the logic being that it was close to his home of Saint Petersburg. Apparently it was for the best that he wasn’t taken too far from where he had grown up, to try and allow him to eventually settle into something _normal_ again, in as familiar a setting as possible. Mihael was fine with that. He supposed there was something comforting in remaining among familiar surroundings, even if it was a very small comfort.

He had taken to spending his days alone, thankfully left to his own devices much of the time. He had tried reading, but found that no matter what he read none of the words would sink in, instead he wound up just staring blankly at the pages before him, the letters blurring together while his mind wandered away, and he was once more forced to relive the events that had brought him here, stripped away every piece of warmth in the world and taken away from him everything that he had ever held dear. He was only grateful that he had enough of a sense of reason left that his mind didn’t stray to what ifs — he knew there was nothing he could possibly have done to change things, and he was okay with that. He didn’t blame himself. He was a child, what could a child have done to prevent a fatal car accident? But there was a part of him that thought maybe that made it worse. There was nothing _anybody_ could have done to prevent it. It was just one of those things, horrible things that happened to random people with no rhyme or reason, and if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else, and the world went on turning while his own fell apart around him, not even a speck on history.

Mihael had been told it was normal to feel as if the world was ending, because his own had been so heavily impacted by what had happened to him. But he didn’t felt like the world was ending at all. He didn’t even feel as if the world was _changing_ , at least not in a way that bore any significance to anybody other than himself. Billions of people around the world, nearly five million of them just in Saint Petersburg itself, were going about their daily lives totally unchanged, not even aware of what had happened to him, and they would continue to do so. In the grand scheme of things, what was two deaths? People died every day, every minute. And more were born in their place, it was the natural order of things. Perhaps Mihael himself had been significantly impacted, but the world around him went on, and he would be expected to do the same, eventually. He hadn’t bothered explaining all this. He was sure his doctors would try to explain that away as well, tell him there was something _normal_ about feeling tiny and insignificant as well. Because of course these two completely opposing feelings would be described as normal to a person going through either of them. But Mihael was sure they weren’t normal feelings at all, because it wasn’t _normal_ to lose your parents at eight years old, and people couldn’t be placed into little boxes according to their reactions to horrible events. In the same way that none of it was normal, it was all normal, no matter how a person reacted, because everybody reacted to everything that happened to them differently. Some people, like Mihael, would acknowledge their own world’s collapse but also the fact that the world in general was completely unchanged, some people would feel the world at large was irrevocably changed, and some would feel entirely differently again.

The world around him had gone on as normal, Mihael had seen that. Winter had turned to spring, the snow had thawed and the weather had gotten warmer, and now spring was turning to summer. Soon enough, summer would turn to autumn, and then the snow would fall again as autumn turned into winter. He would turn nine, he would live through the anniversary of his mother and father’s death, and then he would go through it all again for another year. And he would do that for years and years to come, until it became his normal, and he would settle into a new routine. He would grow to cope with the loss, as everyone who endured horrific losses did, and he would someday be able to live a life that would be normal to him. He would grow warmer, his hands would cease to shake, and through all of it, the world would continue to turn.

He had taken to writing these things down, the only piece of advice he had been given on coping with his feelings that he had taken or even acknowledged. He used to enjoy writing, the escape that was the retreat into his imagination. Now it felt to him like a chose, but he forced himself to do it anyway. He was curious. He planned to write something every day, and compare them as the months went on. He thought maybe there would be some catharsis in watching the way his thoughts and feelings changed. So far there had been no change, but he assured himself that some doctor would tell him that was normal too, and that everyone healed in different ways, and in their own time. He had been through a traumatic event after all, and despite his own pessimism he was able to acknowledge that at least for him, it was life changing.

Mihael had been granted his own room after quietly explaining to one of the nuns that he needed to be alone, that the other children he was living with now were far louder than anything he was used to and that he couldn’t hear himself think. It was a small attic room that none of the other children liked, hardly big enough to store the piles of books that he had brought with him, but it was all he needed. It was far enough from where the other children spent their time that he couldn’t hear them, and he was content in the knowledge that because he so rarely emerged from it the other children had more than likely forgotten that he was even there. At least, the younger ones. Older children tended to have a wider attention span. They also understood better what had happened to Mihael, and tried to speak to him like he was a more _normal_ child, offering attempts at comforting that he hadn’t asked for, just bothering him more than anything. He avoided them even more than the other children his own age, who didn’t quite grasp what had happened to him, and tried to play with him as if he was just like them. Like he was _normal_.

People very rarely visited Mihael’s room. They knew he didn’t like visitors, so he was left to entertain himself unless it was considered important. He was still made to come down to eat, but mercifully he was allowed to do these things at different times from the other children, eating breakfast earlier in the morning because he was always awake, and eating dinner later at night. He found he never really had much of an appetite, but he understood why he wasn’t really given much of a choice — at least he was allowed to only eat small portions, as the idea of having to force himself to eat more made him feel sick. Aside from this, however, Mihael was left entirely alone, which was exactly what he wanted, it had taken several months for this to be established, for him to finally convince the nuns that he didn’t need company, that the last thing he wanted was to be surrounded by other children who would try to talk to him when he had nothing to say to any of them. Perhaps they had just grown tired of arguing with him. He had always been very much his mother’s son in that aspect, he could be impossibly stubborn when he wanted to be. But because he was so often left alone, he found it very strange when he was disturbed in the late morning, hours after he had already had breakfast, being told there was someone looking to see him, and that it was important. Another counsellor? Nobody had told him there was going to be another one, but he supposed it didn’t really surprise him that further attempts to make him talk about his feelings were being made. Apparently isolation wasn’t good for him, maybe they were going to try to talk him out of that. It wouldn’t work.

He was used to being stared at by other children when he emerged from his room by now, so it didn’t bother him. It used to, it used to upset him that when all he wanted was to be left alone and given peace and quiet there were eyes on him every time he went anywhere. But now he was able to just dismiss it. The other children in the nuns’ care weren’t used to seeing him, so it was unusual for them. He could pretend they weren’t looking at him, could pretend some of the older children weren’t murmuring words of pity to each other, lamenting the fact that he’d had to bear witness to such a horrible thing. He had learned to adjust.

He was led into one of the offices, where an old man he had never seen before in his life was stood waiting. He smiled at Mihael and extended a hand to him, which he didn’t shake. Unsurprisingly, the two were left alone and the door to the office closed, and the old man took a seat behind the desk, so Mihael followed suit, sitting in front of him and staring at him expectantly.

“Good morning, Mihael,” he greeted, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

The first thing that struck Mihael was that he greeted him in English. It was known, of course, that Mihael spoke more languages than just Russian — he was fluent in English and French as well, and had been studying Latin before his parents died. However it was unusual for him to be spoken to in any of these other languages, as he was Russian, as were the vast majority of the people around him, and that was his first language, as it was theirs. The second thing that struck him was his accent. He spoke English like a native, and he had an English accent, that ‘standard’ English accent that had long since stopped being the standard for the way the language was spoken even in England. So he was English. What reason had an old Englishman to fly out to Russia to meet a child? Mihael assumed he didn’t speak Russian himself, or he would have defaulted to speaking the language when he greeted him, Mihael assumed. The third thing, and quite possibly the one that bothered him the most despite being something he was very used to, was that he mispronounced his name. It was an easy mistake to make, and he supposed he should just be glad that he hadn’t assumed his name was a misspelling of Michael, but it still tended to irritate him.

“Mee-heye- _ell_ ,” he corrected, “emphasis on the _ell_ , like Raphael.” He explained this in English, sure that whoever this man was, he wouldn’t have a clue what he was saying if he spoke Russian. When he used to visit Moscow with his family, he used to encounter English speaking tourists every so often, and had found that they seemed to assume everybody spoke English, even in a non English speaking country, and never really bothered to learn more than a word or two of Russian. He expected no less now. “Who are you?”

“Apologies, Mihael,” he replied, pronouncing the name correctly this time, “it’s a very unusual name, I’m sure you hear it misspoken more often than not.”

“I do,” he affirmed, “I’m used to correcting people. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Ah, of course. That I didn’t. how very rude of me. My name is Roger Ruvie. I’ve been learning a great deal about you over the last few months, Mihael. I hear you speak three languages?”

“Russian, English, and French,” he replied, nodding, “you’re lucky that yours just so happened to be one I know.”

“Indeed I am. It is unusual how many children such as yourself, whose native language isn’t English but who have a talent for learning languages, wind up learning English early on, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” Mihael shrugged, “England has a long history of stealing land and replacing cultures with its own. At one point it ruled most of the world. If anything it would be more unusual if we chose _not_ to learn English, knowing how important the language has become.”

“You’re very well spoken, given that English isn’t your first language.”

“There’s no point learning a language if I’m not going to learn to speak it properly, is there?”

“Of course, of course. I often find children such as yourself always feel the same way. The proficiency certain foreign children I’ve encountered possess in speaking English never does fail to impress me, however. It’s a difficult language to learn if you aren’t brought up speaking it.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Mihael muttered, “it was horrible. None of your rules make any sense and you break almost every one of them more often than they’re enforced.”

“And yet you speak the language better than many _adults_ I know who were raised speaking it. That’s very impressive, Mihael.”

“Why are you here?” he asked finally, “Surely you have some other reason to have come all the way to Russia than just to marvel at how well I speak English.”

“That’s right, I do,” Roger agreed, “Mihael, have you heard of a man named L?”

“Do you really need to ask that question?” Mihael asked, “Hasn’t everyone?”

“Most people, yes, but there are many who take no interest in the sort of work he does and would pay him no mind. You’re not one of them?”

“No. I do know who he is.”

“Wonderful. That will make explaining the reason for my visit much easier.” Roger smiled at him, leaning forward and resting his chin in his hands. “L has been aware for quite some time that he won’t be here forever, Mihael. But crime will, and there will always be crimes that police around the world can’t solve, long after he’s gone. For this reason, he plans to select a successor for himself, someone who, when L is no longer here to bring justice upon the criminals who are able to evade capture by law enforcement will be able to take up his title as the world’s greatest detective. My job is to find that successor. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do,” Mihael replied, “L is one of the most intelligent people in the world. So you’re looking for similarly intelligent people to potentially take over.”

“Similarly intelligent _children_ ,” Roger corrected, “L was very specific about it having to be children. In fact, Mihael, you’re a little older than we would usually take on, as you only came up on my radar —”

“When my parents died, right?”

“And what makes you so quick to guess that?”

“Well, if I’m older than you usually take on, and you never noticed me before, then there has to have been some event that made it so you would. There hasn’t been any notable jump in my academic performance recently — in fact I’d say it’s suffered recently because I’ve been otherwise mentally occupied. Which leaves one conclusion: you’re specifically looking for _orphaned_ children, which is why you only noticed me so recently, because up until six months ago I wasn’t an orphan.”

Roger’s smile told Mihael that he was _very_ pleased with that deduction. “Precisely, I couldn’t have explained it better myself, Mihael,” he affirmed, “I had a very good feeling about you, it’s why I was willing to make the exception and take you on despite your age. That mind of yours will prove to be special even by the standards I’m used to seeing, I think.”

Mihael leaned back in his chair, mulling everything he had learned during his conversation with Roger over in his mind. At a glance, it seemed like the perfect offer. It was quite the compliment to be told that he was so intelligent that he was fit for consideration as a candidate to succeed the world’s best detective, and of course the idea of someday becoming the next L was one that was of interest to him. What child wouldn’t something like that interest? But he was sure there had to be some kind of catch. Nothing that seemed this perfect ever came without one. And he wasn’t so sure Roger was going to just _tell_ him what it might be — to do something like that didn’t work in his favour, although he was sure he wouldn’t have been the first child to wonder what it was.

“A penny for your thoughts, Mihael?”

“There’s a catch, isn’t there? Something that would make this feel like a much less perfect offer if you were to outright tell it to me.”

“No, no, there’s no _catch_ , per se,” Roger assured, “although you’re not the first to ask. However, if you were to accept this offer, you would have to relocate.”

There it was. Perhaps something like that wouldn’t be a huge detractor from the allure of the offer for many people, but for Mihael it was certainly an idea that gave him pause. He expected the relocation would be to somewhere like America or England, and based on the fact that Roger’s accent didn’t seem to have ever diminished even slightly, Mihael didn’t think he had spent a particularly long time anywhere other than England, so he would guess that it was England he would be required to relocate to. Did Mihael want to someday be able to take up the title of L, the world’s greatest detective? Of course. But was he willing to leave everything he knew behind like that? He wasn’t so sure. He had never been further from Saint Petersburg than Moscow, and now that his parents were no longer with him he wasn’t sure if he would be able to leave the city they had raised him in behind like that. Saint Petersburg was home, it was the only one he had ever known, and it was where his memories of his family remained.

Roger was silent, watching Mihael intently. He was sure the old man had watched this internal debate many times before, was sure he knew exactly what was going through Mihael’s head now. He had to wonder, briefly, how many of the children he had extended this offer to had refused it. How many of them had been unable to pull themselves away from the world they knew in such a spectacular fashion, and chosen to remain where they were, giving up their chance at taking over from L? Was Mihael willing to miss out on a chance like that?

“You’re meant for more than a children’s home on the outskirts of a city in Russia, Mihael,” Roger urged, his voice soft, “you’re _special_. I know it seems scary — you are still only young, after all — but you’ll regret saying no to this if you do, that I can promise you. Never before have I been so certain of the fact that a child _belongs_ with us. They can’t challenge you here, no matter how hard they might try to cater to your mind. Wouldn’t you like to be surrounded by others like you? To be _challenged_ , really challenged? By people who are well aware of what you’re capable of, and are there to push you to become even better? You have incredible potential, Mihael, and it would absolutely break my heart to see you waste that by staying here. I won’t force you, of course, but you must think of the future when you make your decision.”

Mihael remained silent. Roger’s words seemed very carefully chosen, like an attempt at very subtly manipulating Mihael’s decision. But even though he had seen through his attempt at manipulation, the other’s words did stick in his mind. He would regret it if he said no. He knew he would. As much as he didn’t want to leave Saint Petersburg, and all the memories of his family, he knew that a year, two years down the line, he would look back on this conversation and wish that he had said yes. And perhaps by then it would be too late for him to go back on his decision — he had already been told that he was older than the majority of children offered this chance. He had a time limit.

“You don’t need to make your decision right away,” Roger assured him, “I’ll be in Saint Petersburg for the next week. I’ll come and see you again in a few days, you have time to think about it. If you say yes, arrangements will be made, and by this time next week you’ll be travelling with me back to England — we’re based just outside the city of Winchester. If you say no, this will be the last you hear of me, and you’ll be able to go back to your life as you’ve been living it.”

“I’ll go.”

“Oh? Really, Mihael, there’s no —”

“I said I’ll go,” Mihael repeated, “I’ve made my decision. The answer is yes.”

Roger gave Mihael a bright smile, clapping his hands together. “You all always make up your minds so quickly. It’s as if you all know that you’re meant for more than children’s homes such as this can offer you. I assure you, Mihael, you won’t regret this decision. It’ll be a big change for you, but you’ll be glad you decided to make it.”

Mihael just nodded, excitement beginning to settle over him. It was an unusual feeling, after the emptiness that had plagued him for the last six months. It felt as if the ice that had settled and taken hold inside of him had finally begun to thaw. It was an apprehensive excitement, the knowledge that he would soon be in a very unfamiliar environment certainly making him nervous, but who knew? Maybe this could have been exactly what he’d needed all along. A change. A chance to change the course of his life drastically, in a way that never could have happened had he not lost his family.

“I’ll get to making travel arrangements for you right away, Mihael. And I’ll be here to pick you up a week from now. Shall we say, ten o’clock? Not too early, but not too late.”

“Ten o’clock,” Mihael murmured, before nodding his agreement, “okay. That sounds good to me.”

“Perfect! Whatever you need to take with you, make sure you have packed and ready to go by then. You’ll have your own room, so there’s no need to worry about space.” The old man got to his feet, waiting for Mihael to follow suit before once again offering his hand. “I’ll see you very soon, Mihael.”

This time Mihael did shake his hand, managing a smile as he looked up at him. “See you soon.”

Mihael had gotten his packing out of the way quickly, going through all of his books to decide which ones he wanted to take with him, and which he would be leaving behind. He didn’t need to bring everything with him, of that he was sure, as long as he had the important things. He was thinking of this as something of a fresh start, somewhere far away from his old life, and he didn’t want to bring _too many_ memories with him. Only what was really needed. But once the packing was out of the way, still with five days left to wait, Mihael found that the whole thing was beginning to feel a lot more _real_. It had finally been able to begin to dawn on him what he had agreed to, what he was leaving behind. And there was a big part of him that was scared. Scared of putting his life so far behind him, scared of what he was walking into. Did he really want to leave his home behind?

Mihael had found that that question begged another; what did the word _home_ truly mean, and was Saint Petersburg really his home anymore? Or did he just really want it to be? It certainly _was_ his home, once, when his parents were still alive and he had lived here with them, but was it his home without them, or had it been them who made it his home? Could home be a physical place, or was it the people, the memories, that made a place a home? And once those people were gone, and the memories were all that remained to tie him to the city he had grown up in, was he really right in saying that Saint Petersburg was still his home? He was beginning to think that maybe it wasn’t anymore, not really, and that he no longer truly had a home. That he would have to make his own home now that the one had always known had been lost. Maybe Roger’s offer had been just what he needed, the push that it would take to finally make him consider what a home truly was to him. Maybe he should be grateful that he was finally being forced to think about it.

There was still a part of him that was angry at being forced to rethink his mindset. But he was sure he wasn’t the only person who had ever felt that way. Surely it made sense for him to be angry about having this new perspective thrust upon him when he was already stressed over the fact that his life was about to change so massively. Or maybe he was just thinking too much. He had been finding hard to focus on anything but the move, what it would mean for him. Of course had always known that there were other people like him, people who stood out amongst most people around them for their mental prowess, but he had never imagined that anybody, not even L himself, would be rounding children such as himself up the way Roger had described in order to groom them to someday take his place. It was perfect, really, the idea of taking these gifted orphans and giving them a chance at someday taking over from him, setting those who weren’t selected to take his place up to be great in other ways, ways that many children’s homes didn’t have the facilities to. He wasn’t surprised that somebody like L had managed to think that up, but he was sure that no one else would have been able to.

Over the last six months he hadn’t been sleeping much anyway, but he had found that after his conversation with Roger sleep was even further out of his reach, he was filled with a sort of giddy energy that he hadn’t felt in a very long time. Something he thought he might never feel again after he lost his family, during that period of total emptiness that had overtaken him. He had grown used to the idea that everything would feel subdued from then on, that he just had to learn to live with it, and he had gotten to a point where he was all right with that, he didn’t care. He had settled into something of a routine. But that was to be disrupted once again, a new routine developed. He had no idea what that might entail. He was sure Roger would explain everything to him, of course, but he was already beginning to grow impatient. How nice it felt to be excited again.

Finally, it was starting to feel to Mihael like summer was on its way.


	2. Chapter 2

Adjusting to life at Wammy’s House hadn’t been difficult for Mail. He was used to changes in his environment, and he had been carted up and down the country so many times that moving again didn’t matter a toss to him. Despite how significant he had been assured this particular move would be for him, he treated it like any other, simply getting on with things at Wammy’s House exactly the same way he had done at every foster home he had ever lived at — and there had been many of those, even in his seven short years of life before being moved to Wammy’s. Apparently he was a very difficult child to raise. He failed to see how, but he didn’t argue the point; no one would listen to him if he did anyway, because what adult listened to a child when they argued? No one that Mail knew, that was for sure.

At least, no one that Mail knew, except for Roger Ruvie.

Mail had been living at his last home for six months, which was the longest that any foster home had kept him on since he started nursery, and started messing with games consoles and computers, and any other piece of technology he could get his hands on. He had only been three years old at the time, but it seemed that was the point where the brand of a ‘difficult’ child had been slapped on him, because his foster families had never encountered a child like him before, and it was easier to brand a child you didn’t understand as difficult than to try to understand them. Roger explained all of this to him the first time he visited, drinking a cup of tea that had been made for him by the woman who had been caring for Mail at the time, among several other children, whose name was Doreen, which he had told Mail _in confidence_ was far too milky for his liking. Mail had seen through that game within seconds. When he used phrases like that one he put a certain degree of emphasis on them, one that seemed subconscious; it was clear that he was slipping those phrases into the conversation just to establish whether or not Mail knew what they meant. And he said as much. Quite plainly. “Yes, I do know what _in confidence_ means,” he’d told him, blunt as he always was, “and I’m sure I’ll know what any other set of _big words_ you throw at me mean too.” Roger had seemed rather pleased with this, and Mail wasn’t sure if it was the fact that he had picked up on his little test that he was happy about, or his matter-of-fact attitude about it. “Of course you do,” Roger had agreed, with a nod; he’d expected Mail to understand, “you’re a very intelligent young boy, I’m sure you know that too.” Mail _did_ , in fact, know that. He’d been told plenty of times, mostly by surprised teachers every time he moved and started attending yet _another_ new school. If anything, it was starting to get annoying. But he didn’t say that. He was a child of few words, Mail Jeevas, and he didn’t speak unless he felt as though he actually needed to.

Roger didn’t seem to bothered by how quiet Mail was. Instead, he just talked, without stopping to ask if Mail understood, as so many other adults loved to do. Mail found he actually liked that about Roger, he liked not being treated like he was stupid, having adults dumb things down and over-explain everything to him, as if he wasn’t capable of following what someone was saying to him for himself, even though he _knew_ that if he wanted to he could very easily discuss certain topics in ways that would confuse those very adults themselves. Particularly when it came to technology. He was always scolded for taking things apart, told that he would hurt himself by some patronising teacher or foster parent who didn’t even call the various components of whatever Mail was tinkering with by their proper names. He didn’t know if they didn’t use the correct terminology because they were trying to simplify it for the childlike mind he _oh so clearly_ had, or because they just didn’t know. When it came to certain people, he was fairly sure they just didn’t know.

Other children his own age didn’t take too kindly to Mail either, and he didn’t take all to kindly to them. They thought he was mean and got confused when he spoke to them, and Mail found them boring and thought they spoke like toddlers. In the defence of the majority of peers Mail had had throughout his time spent loving at foster homes, Mail _was_ generally rather rude to them. But in the defence of Mail himself, he couldn’t help the fact that the way they talked infuriated him. Naturally, he learned that it was safer just to avoid other children altogether. If he was rude, he got in trouble, but if he tried to be something even vaguely resembling _nice_ , or even just _tolerant_ , he very quickly wound up with a headache.

He discussed all of this with Roger the first time they met, over tea and biscuits that Doreen had very kindly prepared for them. Sure, she was out of her depth trying to raise a boy like Mail, but she made an effort, and she did chime in with little comments about how Mail’s teachers were always _very_ impressed with him, or how he was the cleverest boy she had ever met. Roger had explained that Mail was _gifted_ , and that a simple foster home like this was no place for a boy like him. To Mail, it definitely sounded fishy at first. What kind of old man sauntered into a foster home proclaiming that one of its younger residents was simply _too intelligent_ for that place, and that he needed to be relocated to somewhere better suited to catering to his talents? Certainly the kind of man Mail had been warned time and time again never to go along with — _stranger danger_ , and all of that nonsense. He hated that, it seemed so pointless to him. Surely if a child was stupid enough to follow a man they didn’t know into a white van because they were promised a freddo then it was just natural selection at that point.

But Roger had turned out to be legitimate, as had the home he was representing. Wammy’s House, a home for gifted orphans who were being groomed to potentially one day inherit the title of L, the world’s greatest detective. It was an honour, Roger assured him, to be selected to come and live at Wammy’s House, and if Mail cared at all about the idea of possibly becoming the next L some day he was sure that he _would_ be honoured. But that was the thing. He didn’t care about having a chance at becoming L. he knew who he was, of course, everyone new who he was. Even most of the insufferable children he had been forced to call his peers for the first seven years of his life, with their two _almost_ fully functioning brain cells apiece, knew in _some_ capacity who L was. And Mail did think he was an impressive man, who had achieved far more in his life than the average person could ever hope to. Mail respected him, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be like him. In fact, he would be hard pressed to think of anything he wanted _less_. But he took the chance at a home where, at the very least, the adults around him wouldn’t talk to him like he was a _baby_. He could fake caring about being the next L one day if it meant that he didn’t have to have another teacher’s assistant sit him down and explain to him why it was _very mean_ to call Tommy “an obnoxious little snot-nosed shitbag”, and ask him if he knew what those words meant, as if they thought he made a habit of using words he didn’t know the meanings of in conversation.

Mercifully, he was given his own room. He _hated_ sharing bedrooms, to the point where when he was in foster care he would always ask for his own every time he moved to a new home. He very rarely got it, since the majority of his foster families were big ones, and he would be made to share a bedroom with whichever boy was closest to him in age, which was quite literally the worst form of torture Mail could imagine. It went without saying that Mail did not, ever, get on well with his roommates. His room at Wammy’s House wasn’t particularly _large_ , but that couldn’t matter less to Mail. It was _his_. He didn’t have much to bring with him, other than his GameBoy that he’d had since he was four, and the Nintendo 64 that Doreen had bought for him as a “going away present” — which didn’t make much sense to Mail, but he certainly appreciated it anyway — and the small collection of games he had for them. For the Nintendo 64 he only had _Super Mario 64_ , but he’d had the GameBoy a while, so he’d had time to collect a few games for it, his favourites of which were _Pok_ _é_ _mon Red_ and _Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening_. He’d played both of those games more times than he cared to count, but they still hadn’t gotten old. His copy of _Link’s Awakening_ had been given to him by an older boy when he got the GameBoy, as Mail had always enjoyed sitting in the corner and watching him when he played _A Link to the Past_ on the house’s Super Nintendo. He hadn’t realised he had been so noticeable when he did that, but he appreciated the game — it had become his all time favourite.

He tended to prefer the company of his games to that of other people. The wonderful thing about a game, Mail had found, was that after you had played it once, in its entirety, it could never surprise you again. People were not at all like that. Games were based on coding and algorithms, they came from computers, and they could only do what they were programmed to do, nothing else. People weren’t so easy. They did plenty of things that no one with any sense would _ever_ programme them to do, and they were completely unpredictable. There was no limit to the number of ways a person could surprise you. He didn’t like that about them. He liked predictable, unsurprising, simple things. He always had, and he had a much more natural affinity for dealing with technology than other people, hence his habit of spending all his time taking electronics apart and putting them back together again, messing with computers, and playing games, rather than playing with toys, or _God forbid_ , playing sports.

One of the things Roger had promised him when he agreed to move to Wammy’s House was that he would have a much easier time making friends there. He didn’t care about that from the very beginning anyway, but he did find it amusing just how _untrue_ it turned out to be. Even if Mail had wanted to make friends upon moving to Wammy’s House, he would have had a very difficult time going about it, because it seemed that the small population of Wammy’s House was very cliquey, and it would be near enough impossible for him to find his way into one of those cliques. He’d gathered from overhearing various groups’ whispers when he’d first moved in that they were all very used to a fixed population, and it was quite rare for someone new to move in. Sure enough, in the almost a year and a half that had passed since Mail had moved in, he hadn’t even heard a suggestion of a new child moving to the house. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since the last newcomer had made their home there before him, but he’d gathered that it had been quite a while longer than a year and a half. Needless to say, the place was very exclusive. He supposed he couldn’t blame his house mates for being loathe to welcome him in with open arms, seeing as they had grown so used to the population not changing. He wasn’t here looking for friends anyway. If anything, all Mail really wanted was peace and quiet.

His indifferent stance towards Wammy’s House and its goal allowed Mail to look at it from a unique sort of ‘outsider’s’ perspective. When he arrived at the house, he had been given the alias _Matt_ , and instructed that he was _never_ to go by his real name or give it out, to another resident of the house or to someone from outside, which he had never bothered to argue with, but he had found it quite strange even at the time. The excuse he was given by Roger was that L didn’t go by his real name, and they were given these aliases with the intention of making them more like him. He supposed that _did_ make sense, but he’d had time since he moved into Wammy’s House to see another potential reason for the replacing of the residents’ names with aliases, a reason that, in his mind, made a lot more sense, and was a lot more probable. He was sure that if he mentioned it to anybody else here he would be told it was a ridiculous theory, but to him it seemed like stripping away the child’s individuality, their identities. Taking away their names and replacing them with meaningless aliases that everyone knew weren’t real made interactions feel less personal, because gnawing away at the back of your mind when you spoke to anybody was the knowledge that the name you were using to address them wasn’t actually their own. No one else seemed to be bothered by that. In fact, as far as Mail could tell, they didn’t even seem to _notice_. But that was the thing about Wammy’s House; aside from Mail, it seemed everybody _cared_ about the house’s goal, everyone _wanted_ to be L someday, so of course they would take the excuse they were handed, that they were being made like him, at face value. That was another thing that Mail didn’t like about Wammy’s House. Not the fact that everyone was passionate, that was fine, he found it awkward dealing with people who were speaking passionately about things, but he had nothing against passion. But Wammy’s House was too competitive. Now, competition wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Healthy competition in any other set of circumstances was just fine, but this wasn’t _healthy_ competition. These children were obsessed, and that obsession was encouraged. They were tested every month in all their studied subjects, their scores across all those tests used to rank them in order, number one being the current successor lined up for L. Every month the rankings were posted in the foyer, and every month the entirety of the house’s population was up at the crack of dawn on the day the rankings were posted, waiting to see where they would rank, and most importantly; _who was number one_? It was all they cared about, and Mail was sure that couldn’t be good for anybody.

Another thing he had noticed was how young children usually were when they were first moved to the house. Apparently he had been on the older end for new arrivals at seven, and usually children were picked up when they first started school, sometimes even when they started nursery, as that was when their intelligence would first be really noticed. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, Mail supposed, but he still found it interesting that children seldom moved in when they were over the age of six or seven years old. Children were orphaned after the age of seven, after all, and as far as Mail knew there was no rule stating that a child had to have been an orphan all their life to qualify for a place at Wammy’s House. In fact, he knew there _wasn’t_ one, because he’d heard other children discussing families they’d had early in their lives. So why on earth weren’t older children moved in? Mail reckoned it had something to do with how much more easily impressionable younger children were, but he didn’t like to think much more about it. It was already enough of a conspiracy theory as it was.

Ultimately, Mail didn’t have any real reason to care all that much about his house mates anyway. If they wanted to obsess over _maybe_ being L one day and surrender their childhood to ruthless competition, that was their choice. Mail wouldn’t be among them.

It went without saying that Mail wouldn’t be the one who inherited the title of L, and that wasn’t a fact that he lamented in the slightest. As cool a title as it would be to hold, Mail felt like one needed to _care_ about being L to do as good a job as he did at it. One needed to be passionate about justice and the bringing of said justice upon criminals, and Mail simply _wasn’t_. in fact, he was hardly passionate about anything, he was generally a very indifferent person. He’d never considered that to be a bad thing. He still didn’t, not really. It wasn’t like he _needed_ something to obsess over. Although he supposed that some might consider his love of games and taking apart computers to be an obsession.

He wasn’t sure if he would call it that himself. He saw it more as a hobby, a distraction. Something he had always had a natural talent for dealing with. What was it distracting him from? When Mail was young, he used to wonder about his real family. He had always known he was an orphan, always knew his families were foster ones, because he was moved around so often, and he felt like it was only natural for a child who knew that the parents he was living with were foster parents to wonder about who his real parents were, where they were, and why he wasn’t with them anymore.

Perhaps it was morbid, but as a child Mail had hoped they were dead. His logic for that was simple — if his parents were dead, and that was how he had been orphaned, then that meant that he hadn’t just been abandoned. That was very important to him when he was very young. He didn’t want to think that his family were still out there, and that they just didn’t want him. What child did want to think that? None that Mail could think of. Over the years, however, Mail had stopped caring about things like that. If his parents were out there, alive, and they just didn’t want him, what could he do about that? Nothing, that was what he could do about that. And there was no use dwelling on it. No use sitting around spending hours wondering who his family might be, what sort of people they were, if they had died and left him behind, or if they had simply abandoned him when he was born because they didn’t want him. For all Mail knew, he could have siblings out there somewhere. Maybe they would come looking for him someday. He didn’t have any intention of ever looking for them, if they even existed to begin with.

The quiet at Wammy’s House had given him a lot of time to start thinking about things like that again. Most of it was nonsense, and Mail really didn’t care about it at all, but what else was he to do? His mind tended to wander when he was playing games, and because people tended to know when they weren’t wanted around here there weren’t other children constantly badgering him to come and play with them like he had gotten used to when he was living at foster homes. If it wasn’t so annoying, he’d almost have found it endearing how stubborn they could be, asking again and again if Mail would play with them no matter how many times he told them no (and he wasn’t usually all too kind about it). Now that he wasn’t around them anymore, and instead left to his own devices, he’d had to find other ways of occupying his mind while he played _Zelda_ over and over again, to keep his mind from straying to the family he had convinced himself by now that he didn’t care about.

The best way, he had found, was eavesdropping. The other children at Wammy’s House liked to talk, and he’d developed a habit of sitting just within earshot so that he could listen in on conversations. Usually all he heard was things he didn’t care much about at all — exams, how people thought the next set of rankings might look, whether or not the residents thought whoever was currently sat at number one (one of the older girls, by the alias of Lily) deserved that place — Mail found it painfully boring, but it was something to do, he supposed. At least it kept his mind occupied.

One of his favourite places to sit while he was eavesdropping on the other residents of the house was among some of the shrubbery that could be found all over the grounds, close to the house itself. During the summer months the other children liked to sit in groups outside to enjoy the brief period of sunshine the usually gloomy English countryside was treated to while they talked among themselves, and as it was coming into summer now, June just beginning, everybody had begun making the change from sitting in the living rooms downstairs, or the library, to sitting outside again. When he’d taken his place amidst the bushes after breakfast Mail hadn’t expected to hear anything special, the same nonsense about how people were expecting to do in the next round of exams, but that wasn’t quite what he was met with.

Instead, he was hearing hushed voices, murmuring about a new face that had been spotted early in the morning. That had piqued Mail’s interest, and soon enough he had set his GameBoy down to better focus on what he was hearing. People seemed shocked that less than a year and a half after the most recent arrival — Mail himself — there was someone new here _again_ , and they were all wondering about just what this child had done that had made them stand out so much. There was a lot of debate about the _gender_ of this child, there seemed to be a roughly fifty-fifty split among the people who had seen them, half believing them to be a girl, the other half thinking they were a boy with long hair. Standard English accented voices muttered about how they were “probably a _foreigner_ ,” while other accents expressed their disdain towards those remarks, calling them “xenophobic”. Mail found himself wishing they would skip the debates about nationality, he’d personally never understood why it mattered to anybody where a person was from, but certain people seemed fixated on it. Apparently, however, this new arrival _did_ look Scandinavian, pale and blonde. There were also remarks made about their _weight_ , with several people wondering just what sort of background they had come from, as they thought they looked far too thin. No one was really sure about their age, no one had gotten a good enough look at them to guess.

He could have laughed at himself, growing so curious about a new arrival like this. He’d thought he was above the gossip the other children here loved so much, but perhaps that wasn’t really the case. Throughout the course of the morning children would rush in and out of the building, relaying new pieces of gossip they had heard from God only knew where, until eventually there was a generally agreed upon profile circulating. The new arrival’s gender was still a mystery, they were short and skinny, very pale, with white blonde hair that was about shoulder length. Some people said their eyes were blue, others said green, and others said that the ones who thought they knew their eye colour were full of shit, no one had gotten that close. Mail personally agreed with the third group on that.

There was a part of him that felt bad for this new arrival, whoever they were. He could remember well the strange looks and whisperings he had been subjected to whenever he went anywhere in the house when he first arrived, and he was sure the treatment they would get would be much the same. Already, before they had even emerged from Roger’s office, people were debating how they would place in the exams, and if they would be anything special. Of course, it went without saying that _everyone_ here was special, that was the point, but because of that the residents of Wammy’s House had a very different definition of the word. You were only _special_ if you placed well in the rankings. Mail wasn’t considered special, that was something he had learned after his first round of exams, when his scores had failed to impress the rest of the house. He didn’t care about that much himself, but he knew there were others whose rankings were similar to his own who were deeply affected by it. He hoped for their sake that this new arrival had thick skin, they would need it if they were going to live in a place like this.

Mail’s interest diminished as the morning went on and there was no new news of the house’s newest occupant. They had yet to be seen again, and he was sure they had simply chosen to skip the tour of the house and just go straight to their room. That was exactly what Mail had done when he first moved in, he didn’t want to have to be paraded around the house while everyone stared at him like he was some kind of animal with two heads. He didn’t envy them the few months they were in for now, constantly being stared at and talked about. He almost hoped for their sake they would prove to be unremarkable, at least then the chatter about them would die down sooner, and they would be able to get on with their life without so many eyes on them.

It was early afternoon when a name finally started circulating. Their alias was _Mello_ , and now it was pretty much confirmed that they were, in fact, a boy with long hair, although some people still had their doubts about that. No one had spoken to them yet, but apparently Lily had asked Roger when she ran into him, although that information had probably gone through so many filters by now that Mail wasn’t sure yet whether or not he believed it was all true. One thing that did interest him, however, was Mello’s apparent age. Apparently Roger had told Lily that he was _eight and a half_ , which made him the oldest new arrival the house had _ever_ had. The same age as Mail was now.

The conversation shifted after that piece of information was revealed, everyone now was certain Mello had to be particularly special, otherwise the risk wouldn’t have been taken on someone so old. He had even heard a few people speculating that he might dethrone Lily, who had been number one for the last three years now. Not many people seemed to actually believe that, but they still wondered at the possibility. Poor Mello. Mail hoped he hadn’t been wanting a quiet life at Wammy’s House, and that Roger had warned him beforehand about how he would be talked about. He doubted that, though. Roger hadn’t said a single thing to him about the way the children here liked to gossip, and he’d come to believe that was because he paid so little attention to the goings on within the house that he just hadn’t noticed.

As afternoon bled into evening and the mild temperature began to drop, people began retreating indoors. It wasn’t warm enough just yet for everyone to stay outside into the evenings as they would during July and August. Mail decided not to follow suit, however. He liked when it got cooler and started to get dark, the bright sunlight made it harder to see the screen of his GameBoy, but that wasn’t an issue as the sun started to go down, provided he sat at the right angle. As the hours went on it grew almost silent outside as everyone made their way inside, save for the sounds of chirping birds and rustling leaves. Just the way Mail liked it. Usually this was the time that he struggled to keep his mind from wandering, but in spite of the fact that he told himself he didn’t care about new arrivals, his mind was very much focused on him. He doubted he’d speak to him much, if at all, given his habit of avoiding interacting with his house mates, but he did have to wonder if Mello would fare better than him with making friends. Perhaps Mail was just bad at things like that, and someone else might have a better chance. If he wasn’t as fond of his own company as Mail was, he would probably have a hard time here if he wasn’t able to settle into a group.

He was so tangled up in his thoughts that he didn’t hear footsteps approaching, didn’t notice someone sitting down next to him until they spoke. “I thought I could hear someone here.” The accent he spoke with was definitely _Russian_ , not Scandinavian, but looking at him Mail could understand why people had guessed that Mello might be from Scandinavia. If he wasn’t seeing him right in front of him, he wouldn’t have believed that someone could have such pale colouration, his hair was so light it almost matched his skin. “Everyone else has gone in. It’s getting cold.”

“You’re still out here,” Mail replied, pausing his game to focus better on him. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m used to cold,” Mello replied simply, with a smile, “that’s why I came outside.”

“Reminds you of home?”

Mello was silent, his smile quickly replaced with a frown, and Mail wondered for a second if he shouldn’t have said that. Usually he didn’t care about what he should or shouldn’t say, but the expression he was greeted with wasn’t the confusion of a child who didn’t understand what Mail had just said to them, followed by tears when they decided it must be offensive because they didn’t know what it meant. This was a sort of melancholy, like he had sparked memories in Mello’s mind that the boy would rather not address. Before he could apologise, though, Mello shook his head, his hair bobbing along with it. “I’ve hardly left yet. I don’t need a reminder.”

“I wouldn’t know what it’s like,” Mail admitted, “I’ve never been in one place longer than a few months. Other than here, obviously. Never really had anywhere to call home, you know?”

“I understand. How long have you been here?”

“A year and a half, nearly. Not long after I turned seven, I moved in.”

“Do you like it here?”

“That’s a loaded question,” Mail answered, “I don’t think it’s so much about _liking_ this place as it is about believing in it.”

“Do you?”

“Believe in it? I don’t really know.”

Mello went quiet again, nodding to himself. Mail had to wonder what he thought of that response, if he was able to make something of it that made sense to him. Mail wasn’t sure it even made perfect sense to him. “Maybe you’ll learn to believe.”

“Do you think you will?”

“Who knows? I’ve only been here since this morning.”

“People have been talking about you all day. Did Roger warn you about that? They like to gossip here. You won’t be able to go anywhere without people saying something about you to their friends.”

“I’m used to people talking about me when they think I’m not listening,” Mello assured, “adults have no tact. They discuss me as if I’m not in the room, talking about what a pitiful little thing I am.”

“Pitiful?”

“Six months ago I lost my family. So now I’m pitiful. Apparently I can’t just be sad — I have to be something they can try to care for. Like a lamb without it’s mother, lost.”

“You don’t agree with them, I take it?”

“No. I can be sad without anybody interfering. In fact, I think I would have liked that a lot more. But it was very hard to convince them that leaving me alone was the best thing to do.”

“I prefer to be left alone too.”

“Have you lost your family?”

“Maybe. I never knew them. For all I know they just dumped me, or maybe I did lose them.”

“It doesn’t hurt you to think about it?”

“It used to. I got used to it. It’s easy to do that when you can’t even begin to imagine what they might have looked like.”

“Do you wonder if they’re watching over you now?”

“I don’t believe in that. If they’re dead, then they’re dead.”

“Ah, I see. Perhaps that’s what’s easier to believe, if you never knew them.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, I would hate to think of a family I never knew watching down on me, lamenting the time we never spent together. It would be easier to believe there’s nothing after death, so they don’t have to wish to have been there while I grew up all my life. But it’s different for me, because I knew my family. I prefer to imagine them watching.”

“You’re religious then?”

“Yes. But I understand people who aren’t. Some people can’t believe in something they have no evidence for.”

“You say that like you have evidence.”

“No, I have faith. That’s all I need.”

It was Mail’s turn to go quiet now. A part of him wondered how someone who had gone through such a catastrophic loss could still believe in a God that had done nothing to prevent it. But he didn’t think it was his place to ask a question as personal as that one. Perhaps it was the idea of a God that had comforted Mello through that loss, how was he to know? “I’m Matt, by the way,” he said, changing the subject, “I already know your name, Mello.”

“Ah, yes, you did say that the others were talking about me.”

“They were wondering what made you stand out. They talked about me non stop when I first got here as well. It does die down eventually, they’ll find something new to obsess over.”

“’They’? Not you as well?”

“No, not me. Not that I’m trying to act all high and mighty. I just find it boring. I don’t really talk to anybody here.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“No. I never had friends before I moved here, why would I suddenly want them now?”

“Neither did I. The children in Saint Petersburg didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand them. I think it’s because our minds were so different. That’s probably why you didn’t get on with other children very well either.”

“I didn’t like any of them,” Mail admitted, “I lived in foster homes before here, so there were always other children around, and they just made me angry. Talking to any one of them gave me a headache.”

“I just got confused. And so did they. Nothing we said made sense to the other. I got used to that, though. I never really minded not having many friends, my parents tried their best to understand me instead.”

“You must miss them.”

“I do. But sometimes things happen for a reason. Perhaps I was supposed to lose them, so I could end up here. Roger told me they don’t usually offer places to children my age.”

“No, they don’t. I was seven, and I was apparently on the older end. I heard some people saying you were the oldest new arrival they’ve ever had here.”

“No pressure then,” Mello joked, “I wonder what they expect.”

“Does it matter? You aren’t here to impress any of us. If you’re here then Roger thinks you’re special, surely that’s all that matters. That’s all you had to prove.”

“You don’t try to prove anything?”

“Why should I? I know what I am, what I can do, and I couldn’t care less what anybody else thinks of me. Life is easier once you realise that literally no one’s opinion of you matters at all to you in the grand scheme of things other than your own.”

“You’re used to negative opinions of you,” Mello murmured, “and that’s why you ignore them. If people were kinder to you, I think you might care more for them.”

“Why is that the conclusion you jump to?”

“It’s easier to be indifferent to people who treat you badly. If people were kinder, you wouldn’t have had such an easy time dismissing them.”

“You… you might be right, Mello.”

“I’m very rarely wrong. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

Mail found himself smiling, laughing softly through his nose as he nodded in agreement. “I suppose it is.” He paused for a moment, then took a look at Mello. “Have you eaten yet today? It was ages before I got a chance on my first day.”

“Not yet. I was in the office all morning, and I waited for it to go quiet before I came outside.”

“Good idea. But you should probably eat something. I haven’t had dinner yet either — but everyone else should be done by now, so the cafeteria will be quiet. No one to stare at you and all that. I don’t know about you, but that made me really uncomfortable when I first got here.”

Without thinking, he offered his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding his GameBoy, to Mello as he stood up, to help him get to his feet. Mello took it, and once he was standing Mail noticed just how small he really was, he was shorter than him, and Mail himself wasn’t exactly _tall_ for his age, and he really was thin enough that he looked like if Mail blew hard enough at him he might fall over. Mello dropped his hand after a moment, tucking his hair behind his ear and following as Mail started walking. He led the other boy inside, glad to find the foyer was empty. The talk about him would probably start again if the others saw him leading Mello around on his first day there, and despite how used to the gossip he had gotten, that didn’t mean he wanted to be subjected to it again.

“If there’s no food left, the ladies in the kitchen will make something for you,” Mail assured, “they do it for me all the time, ‘cause I don’t like eating with the others.”

“Why not?”

“They’re _loud_. Loud and annoying. I prefer quiet when I eat.”

“So do I,” Mello replied, “I stayed at a small home in Russia before coming here, and they used to let me eat at different times so I could avoid the others. They were kind to me there, they let me be alone.”

“They’ll let you be alone here too, if that’s what you want. So long as you don’t cause trouble and show up for all your exams on time, they tend to let you do what you like. I do like that bit about living here. And once the gossip dies down, all the other kids will leave you alone too. After they stopped talking about me no one paid any attention to me at all. I can just do what I want.”

“How long did it take for them to stop talking about you?”

“A month or so. I didn’t stand out enough to everyone else in my first round of exams for me to be worth their time, I think. I don’t care, really. I don’t actually want to be L, I just wanted some peace and quiet, that’s why I moved here. If you do well though, they’ll probably talk about you for longer. I don’t know.”

“Roger did tell me the rankings were very important. One girl has been at the top for three years?”

“Yeah, she has. At this point none of us reckon she’ll be beaten. But who knows, I did hear a few people say maybe, since you’ve got to be extra special for Roger to have brought you here at your age, you might do it.”

“Maybe. We’ll have to wait and see — I don’t know what these people are capable of.”

“Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t, right? It’s just a number.”

“I don’t know if everyone else living here would agree with you.”

“Probably not. But that’s all it is.”

Mello just hummed to himself as he followed Mail into the cafeteria. Mail grabbed his hand to lead him over to the kitchen window. For once, he didn’t hate the time he was spending speaking to another person. Perhaps Roger had been right about Mail being able to make friends after all.


End file.
